The Bad

The evolution of the tower defense genre has been a fairly interesting ride. On one side, we have the developers who decided early on that the only way to properly proceed was to pile on the options, bump up the towers, throw in lots of statistics and make the whole experience as difficult (yet ultimately rewarding) as possible. However, while hardcore TD has certainly found itself a sizable audience, there are also those of us who want something a little more simple and compact.

Asteroid Tower Defense offers just 8 different towers and a single, never-ending level – and yet it’s easily one of the more thrilling tower defense games available for Android to date.

Meteors are zooming towards the Earth, threatening to turn our home planet into rubble. Our last hope is a small space station just outside of the ozone layer, which is ready and willing to have a heap of guns, blasters and shields attached to it.

The idea is to choose an edge of the space station, choose the type of gun or shield you want, and hey presto, you’re ready to keep the burning space rocks back. As you shoot rocks down, you’ll be rewarded with cash which can then be used to buy even more guns, and slowly build up a devastating defensive line that the space debris can’t get through.

There are no hard strategic elements to Asteroid Tower Defense – rather, it’s all about having a good spread of every type of unit, and then keeping your front line on its toes, replacing anything that gets destroyed and upgrading all your best units so they can be at their most destructive.

As you beat each wave, you’ll level up and unlock upgrades for each unit – but again, there’s nothing too deep here. You can simply touch a unit, then press upgrade and bang, it’s done. In this way, units can be set up and upgraded within seconds, allowing you to concentrate on keeping the barrage back, rather than thinking about unnecessary statistics and the like.

Asteroid Tower Defense feels incredibly well designed and stylish. The interface is really easy to understand and use, and you’ll be banging new units in swiftly and precisely with no trouble. The rocks look and feel so powerful, yet as you manage to only just keep them back, that feel of power is transferred to you, the player, and it’s constantly action-packed and exciting.

There’s a downside to all this simplicity, however – it turns out that Asteroid Tower Defense is also incredibly easy. When you get to around level 25, you begin to realise that nothing is really going to test you. At level 50, it becomes apparent that there is nothing new to see, and you’re just doing the same thing over and over again.

Essentially, it’s impossible to lose. Any average TD player could easily go on forever – and judging by the online high score tables, some people are. The only element that occasionally adds trouble is the need for solar panels to keep the whole station running, but once you’ve got your head around those, it’s easy as pie.

With only one mode available, the game runs out of steam after just an hour of play. But with the zero-dollar price tag, plus the promise from the developer that more weapons and units are on the way soon, Asteroid Tower Defense is still very much worth picking up.